What do you want for the SPECIAL system in Fallout 5?

MY IDEA
-Return to the original system for statistics. You assign all your SPECIAL points at the beginning of the game and you have to either use a perk or get an implant to increase them.

-Ditch the point-based skill system and go for a tier-based one. You get a certain number of points and you can spend them to upgrade your skill tier. Each tier would require a certain number of points and not all skills would have the same number of tiers. A skill like Guns might have eight tiers, a skill like Science or Lockpick might have only five. Upgrading your skills might both increase your effectiveness with certain equipment or tasks (Increasing Guns gives you more damage, Medicine makes chems more effective, et cetera) or give you a small perk. If settlement building or crafting are brought back, your ability to craft items and structures will be dependent on your skill tier, not a perk. This system would better reward the player and also avoid the issue of "don't put just one point into Lockpick."

-You get a perk point every couple of levels (3, maybe) that gives you a perk like previous games. Certain perks will have SPECIAL or skill requirements.

-At the beginning of the game, you pick two Traits, ala Fallout: New Vegas.

-If Wild Wasteland is a thing, it's an option like Hardcore/Survival mode, not a Trait.

Assign special at the start, which can only be changed temporarily through item effects (clothing/armor/drugs/etc.)

Bring back traits, but where good traits add points and bad traits remove points until you reach 0 (similar to traditional Fallout traits but you'd have much more fine control when building a character you'd enjoy)

Kill experience, it's meaningless already anyway, instead increase skills though world interactions (you found a very rare intact Big Book of Science/that guard you just spoke to runs a pistol match, he may be willing to impart some of his knowledge for a fee). This rewards exploration, something Bethesda does pretty well, and gives the world some character.

Perks should unlock naturally when you increase your skills. A character high in lockpick, for example, doesn't need to crack that lock because they can abuse the safe harmonics and Fonz their way in, but they aren't going to know that if they've never practiced breaking a safe lock.

This allows a lot of customization for your character but it's still simple enough for any idiot to figure it out, improves interactions with the world without too much additional writing, allows you to limit "checks" to just special stats if you want, and lets you better control the flow of the game (you have to interact with early game characters or explore early game areas to some extent before you can survive late game areas). The skills would need a bit of work, some purging and some additions, but this in combination with the ability to say no sometimes would provide predictable improvements to your character regardless of your playstyle, and even give some room for interesting min-maxing.

Since the series is already part of the ES franchise in all practical senses and there's no going back, it probably wouldn't hurt to add an element of learn by doing from TES to catch up with that background drive for the character to do stuff. Since, yeah, the ES gameplay without it is just boring. Not designed like ES verbatim though, where the heart of the progression is the skill grind, but as a complementary system at the background that still keeps the crux of character advancement on getting XP from quests and point buy at level up (plus perks when eligible). Wizardry 8 has a good example of such system.

Doesn't matter, though. The new game's years away and I won't be buying it anyway (unless there's some sort of 8th wonder of the world type miracle).

Sometime, I think the SPECIAL should be locked (or Capped)by certain limit: If you are a bookworm from start, no matter how much you try, you would never become a muscle guy/chick; and if you are an a$$hole from the start, you won't become a nice guy during play through.

Sometime, I think the SPECIAL should be locked (or Capped)by certain limit: If you are a bookworm from start, no matter how much you try, you would never become a muscle guy/chick; and if you are an a$$hole from the start, you won't become a nice guy during play through.

AKA, what's your character design DICTATED your whole play-through.

Click to expand...

I think you do need some leyway to fix character mistakes, especially on your first playthrough.